Finally got around to uploading track three to my gumroad store I made one final edit before posting; I changed the orientation of Silas' head on the last page to make him look more forelorn and less like he was just staring off into the distance. I still maintain that I'm not a cartoonist any more: these are just prolonged illustrations. With words.
The book is finished and up at my Gumroad store. It was a lot longer than I thought it would be. The one thing that bothers me is that I wanted it to be a free download, but unless you have a paid Gumroad account, you can't have files bigger than 25MB and this is ten times that. So, I set it for a buck. I can always hope. I'm pretty happy with the book overall. I like the work in it and it's formatted well enough if not excitingly so. At the very least, it's something I've been meaning to do for a long time and I can now check it off the list.
Changes. Had some comments that allowed me to finally see that this sequence wasn't reading well at all; the text and intent were just too vague. So I added a couple pages, isolating the text and leaving the billboards blank. I also removed some of the detail from the billboard as it wasn't adding anything to the image and was taking away from the fact that they're supposed to look empty. So, lesson learned. I also went back and changed the background of the page previous to these to add a transition that was sorely needed. Saddest part about this is that, prior to these five pages, the last time I worked on this comic was last august.
So there's this. I've been listening to a lot of music lately, lamenting the fact that I didn't pursue music instead of art. Music touches me in ways that art never has. Music makes me FEEL something, like I want to be a part of it, want to sing, play or something. I think it's the most powerful form of art simply for the way that it has the ability to grab people and bring them together. Visual arts, where I've spent my creative 'career' interests me deeply, too, gets my fire going. Not as much as music does. And that brings us to this. I stopped being a cartoonist partially as that boulder seemed far too heavy for so steep a hill. I'd done comics, had middling response. So to keep pushing on a project I knew was going to take me years to finish and would get no response til it was done just seemed insurmountable. But "City Silent" is based on music. There are songs, even if there are no melodies to go with them. And I would dearly love there to be melodies. That frustration, that inability to express is at the core of what this comic is about and, even more specifically, what this song is about. That's probably one of the reasons I got stuck on these pages so long ago and stopped. I'm writing and drawing about writer's block, a lack of inspiration. I shouldn't be surprised. So watching some videos, hearing music through others' ears poked at me and, in a couple of days, I did this. I have no idea if I'll be able to continue in any way with this. For now, pages.
